Army Chief’s outcry tests boundaries

Questions over strategic capability . . . Australian troops land in East Timor.
Photo: Glenn Campbell

by
Geoffrey Barker

The Rum Corps spirit never entirely deserts the Australian Defence Force. When money is tight and deployments are waning, as they are now, Rum Corps ghosts rise again to demand tribute from the nation. Some army leaders, echoing their colonial ancestors, are now campaigning defiantly against budget cuts and in support of structuring the ADF increasingly for expeditionary warfare far from Australia and surrounding regions.

The campaign was energised by a recent contentious speech by the feisty Army Chief, Lieutenant-General
David Morrison
, who seemed at times to test the limits of the army’s declared commitments to civilian control and to assisting the federal government to achieve a budget surplus.

General Morrison’s remarks came against a background of defence budget cuts totalling $5.5 billion over four years and as Defence Force deployments to Afghanistan, East Timor and elsewhere are winding down.

At the same time, Defence officials are working on a new Defence white paper and a national security statement to be released early next year. It remains to be seen whether the government confirms its commitment to funding 12 new submarines, up to 100 F-35 joint strike fighters, and new land vehicles for the army.

General Morrison’s speech barely acknowledged that the army was the paid servant of government policy. He spoke as if it was an independent institution with rights to speak out, make demands and warn political leaders against resisting its demands.

The Gillard government, reluctant to challenge a service chief supported by senior officers, has reacted cautiously to General Morrison’s remarks.

Its response contrasts markedly with the decision to remove retired Major-General
Duncan Lewis
as Defence Department secretary after he made a far more cautious public speech about the need to match strategic rhetoric and defence funding.

Despite widespread speculation that Lewis was removed partly because of conflicts with Defence Minister Stephen Smith over financing, General Morrison charged boot and saddle into the issue in a recent speech to the National Security Institute at the University of Canberra.

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In what appeared to be a manoeuvre to close ranks around Morrison, who allowed some of his remarks to published in The Australian newspaper before he spoke, he was supported at the lecture by General Peter Leahy, a former army chief and now a professor at the university, and by Major-General Michael Jeffery, the former governor-general.

Morrison reportedly did not clear the speech with the Defence Force Chief, General David Hurley, or with new Defence secretary Dennis Richardson. But Prime Minister
Julia Gillard
said Morrison was entitled to raise any issue he wanted and Stephen Smith said Morrison had been misquoted. He wasn’t.

The reality is that governments find it easier to oust civilian Defence Department secretaries than service chiefs. “Labor governments have to be holier than the Pope in handling the military," one experienced observer says.

Morrison started his speech by saying that he “never would" use “megaphone tactics" with the government. But it was quickly obvious that that was precisely what he was doing.

His speech sounded in parts like a barely disguised statement of support for the Liberal Coalition’s preference for forward expeditionary defence policy over the so-called defence-of-Australia strategy developed by Labor ministers such as Kim Beazley since the 1980s.

He genuflected dutifully, if briefly, to the supremacy of civil authority and declared the Defence Force “has always shouldered its share of the burden in finding savings to support the government of the day in achieving the sound fiscal position upon which our security ultimately rests".

But while conceding the army is in “great shape", about the right size and with sound modernisation plans, General Morrison also noted it was “a surprisingly fragile mechanism . . . its capability can be relinquished disturbingly rapidly if it is not carefully developed and sustained". Those were hardly the comments of a leader looking enthusiastically at helping the government to find savings.

Neither were his later comments that “it is not the time to reduce our deployable military capability" and that “there is a national imperative to weigh carefully the real cost of diluting that capability" and that “we are approaching a point where doing more with less risks becoming a disregard for the ability of forces to survive against credible peer competitors". (He did not identify these credible peer competitors.)

General Morrison was even more forceful in insisting on the importance of “correct strategic choices" over the next three to five years. His concern over possible “chronic underinvestment" in the army was surpassed only by his hostility to the emphasis now placed in national strategic policy on the defence of Australia and its sea and air approaches and the security of Australia’s immediate neighbourhood.

General Morrison insisted “the real world has required the nation to engage in military expeditions in pursuit of our strategic interests". He wanted an army equipped for and capable of long-distance “forward defence". The focus on the sea-air gap to Australia’s north and north-west, he said, was based on “poor history and even worse geography".

“We are not surrounded by a sea-air gap, but rather live amid a densely populated archipelago which constitutes a sea, air, land bridge to our northern approaches."

He chose to ignore the current carefully balanced White Paper assessments that “we have to be prepared to both act decisively close to home while being ready where necessary to contribute further away from our shores" and that “all other things being equal, our capacity for influence and our imperative for action are going to be a function of proximity".

Proximity is not a concern for General Morrison and army leaders urging a stronger focus on “forward" rather than “continental" defence. “Throughout our history we have supported the global order secured by the hegemony of the dominant liberal democratic maritime power," General Morrison said.

To focus on a strategy of denial across the sea-air gap is “historical amnesia" and “breathtaking in its complacency". These remarks are code for the familiar claim that the army knows best and is entitled to speak out because soldiers and not politicians bear the gravest burdens of military engagements.

They are also code for the army’s desire for more troops and ever-heavier armoured forces capable of distant expeditionary deployments beyond Australia’s primary regions of strategic interest. The remarks reflect an impatience with the realities of geography and national interest.

In fact the army now is more heavily equipped with tanks and other armoured vehicles, and it does, as the current White Paper suggests, engage in both continental and regional and expeditionary deployments.

General Morrison and those of similar mind are not, of course, seeking to emulate the rebellious old Rum Corps that ousted Governor Bligh in 1808 and initiated two years of military rule in colonial NSW. But army interests are pushing hard for greater power, a bigger share of a declining defence budget, and greater influence over strategic policy.

Their attitudes skirt the boundaries of insolence and insubordination. They need to be reminded that in democracies the army should always be on tap, but never on top. The army does not exist outside the constraints of constitutional democracy.